Category Archives: Women

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
– SIGMUND FREUD, Ernest Jones’ Sigmund Freud: Life and Work

ASIYA’S day starts at 5.30am. She says her prayers, cooks breakfast for her family, and a curry for dinner, wakes up her three children, feeds them, sends them to school, and then cleans her one-room rented accommodation in a shanty town of Karachi. She leaves home at 9am to work as a domestic helper, and gets back by 6pm. Then onwards, household chores keep her occupied.

Her husband doesn’t have a job since they moved from south Punjab to Karachi. Yet, she is the one doing double duty, managing her home and wearing a second hat as the family’s sole breadwinner.

“Time for myself? Never thought about it,” she says. Her monthly salary is Rs20,000 ($150).

Across a few roads where more affluent Karachiites reside lives Saima (name changed) who earns six times as much as Asiya, her monthly salary as an assistant manager at a multinational firm touching Rs120,000 ($900), more than what her husband earns. Yet Saima’s routine is pretty similar to Asiya’s. In addition she is a caretaker to her elderly mother-in-law once she is back from work.

UNDP’s human development report highlights that care work, mostly undertaken by women, is what enables a majority of the paid work which drives economies. Yet, as it is unpaid, it is under-documented and taken for granted. According to a recent report by the International Labour Organisa­tion (ILO), globally women perform 76.2 per cent of total hours of unpaid care work, more than three times as much as men.

In Asia and the Pacific, this rises to 80pc, where women spend 4.1 times more time in unpaid care work than men. Around the world, women spend two to 10 times more time on unpaid care work than men. Countries have valued unpaid care work between 15 and 39pc of national GDP.

At the recent United Nations World Data Forum 2018 hosted by the UAE government, Gender Data remained at the forefront of discussion as more than 2000 academics, statisticians, and activists from both the public and private sectors globally sat down to discuss the impact of data, especially Gender Data. Data2X, led by the United Nations Foundation, is a key organisation among Gender Data initiatives, and defines Gender Data as “data that is disaggregated by sex (e.g. school enrollment by sex), as well as data that pertains specifically to women and girls (e.g. maternal mortality rates). This data is critical to determining the size and nature of social and economic problems, the causes and consequences of those problems, how to design policies to combat them, and the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of those policies”.

While the Pakistan government strives to get over its economic crises and the subsequent cost on human development, half of the country’s population — women — and data related to their needs and their economic contribution remains mostly missing.

Women’s rights proponents like Ume Laila Azhar, Executive Director of Home Net Pakistan, highlight these issues at the policy level.

“If women are counted in statistics, their work must be counted too,” she says. Ms Azhar adds that in the Human Development Index, if women are not recorded in the labour participation figures, it shows low female participation. “If the numbers of women in the work force appear to be too small, women are not considered at the policy level — policies that translate into job opportunities or initiatives for skill development for women,” she says.

Time Use Surveys (TUS), an important tool in this regard, measure how, on an average, people spend their 24 hours in what activities. “TUS are the best instrument to measure unpaid care work, since they measure the time people spent on this work,” says Mayra Buvinic, senior fellow at Data2X and an internationally recognised expert on gender and development. Linking the dots of TUS to the evaluation of unpaid work, Ms Buvinic says that by assigning a value to unpaid care work, “you make this work visible to policymakers who design policies to increase labour force participation rates and provide social services, including paid care services”. “Unpaid care needs to be factored in the design of these policies since it conflicts with labour force participation and it provides an estimate of the need for child and elder care,” she adds.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) target to improve women’s lives by encouraging their economic participation and financial inclusion. Gender Data is an important tool in the achievement of the SDGs.

A recent tweet by philanthropist Shaniera Akram resonated with the twitterati where she mentioned how women’s multi-tasking and contribution is undervalued. Speaking with Dawn, Ms Akram says that women are often overworked and under-appreciated, not just in Pakistan but all over the world.

“Women can’t be taken for granted anymore. Men can’t just take all the credit, especially when the women — mother, daughter or wife — are taking care of everything behind the scenes,” she says, suggesting that society will benefit from incentivising staying home and taking care of children, the elderly and sick or disabled relatives, with a domestic allowance for women.

“We must focus on getting to a point where women don’t just have the right but also the choice between wanting to stay at home and going into the formal work force,” she adds.

“When families in rural Sindh or Punjab work on lands of landlords with tenancy arrangements, the whole household is working — including the women and children — whose contribution isn’t counted,” points out Ms Azhar. Rural women do a lot of unpaid work like growing vegetables for food sustenance, looking after cattle and milking cows, doing not double but triple duties.

“A woman overworking is a form of exploitation, and she doesn’t get the respect and acknowledgement she deserves for her contribution,” she says.

The catwalk is where you see ‘beautiful’ women. Thin, young, unblemished, unwrinkled women. Because that is our criteria of beauty. The fashion arena has no place for cellulite and scars, nor does it welcome aging.

But a recent fashion show by designer Cheena Chhapra in Pakistan Fashion Week (PFW) in Karachi was clearly thinking outside the box. These were, what the designer called in her Instagram post, “real women”. There were white-haired women and over-sized women and women of all ages and sizes… including pregnant women. They were real alright. But were they beautiful?

50 is the new…?

The pressure on women is immense. ‘Kill me but make me young’ is the silent but definite mantra. The compliment a woman is conditioned to receive as the biggest compliment is this: “Oh my God, you look so young, I thought your daughter was your sister!” It started with ‘40 is the new 30’. You had to look a decade younger. Now it’s 60 is the new 40’, and the yawning gap that women must cover up has reached about 20 years.

Even the most honest of women who don’t lie about anything else will be found sneakily hiding a few years from their age. The white hair near the forehead are not welcome for a woman; neither is the frizz or the thinning of hair in the front of the crown. It is a much tougher deal for a woman if, because of any reasons, chemotherapy for example, she loses hair.

But men are ok even if they are bald, and in fact are considered more “distinguished looking” if they have gray or silver hair.

These judgments are not just coming from men. They are coming from women against other women too. Our remarks, attitudes and body language end up impacting other women in terms of how they look at themselves. Thus the increased emphasis on invasive procedures to make lips look plumper, skin look more stretched, the nose look less droopy, and the face look unwrinkled. There are even more invasive procedures for many body parts, better left unsaid.

Sized up

Each one of us, at some stage in life, has heard comments about our weight and size and body type. “You look too thin; are you ill?” if you have lost weight, interspersed with unasked for suggestions to put on thora sa (a little bit). Or “You’ve put on haven’t you? I know a great Zumba instructor”. When women go looking for girls for their sons or brothers, they want the “slim, fair” variety. It is as if society measures you up in kilogrammes instead of talents and values. Fat shaming is not always verbal or direct. It can be done in a subtle manner, making the other person feel lesser because of the extra weight.

While fitness is important, both in terms of health as well as well-being, we are born with certain genetic dispositions when it comes to our body types — the pear shape, the apple shape, the hour glass shape. We don’t really have a choice in that.

Women’s bodies undergo multiple changes over time due to hormonal ups and downs, childbirth, or simply age. You cannot and will not have a body of a 25 year old if you are 45, but you can be fit and healthy if you work at it.

It started with ‘40 is the new 30’. You had to look a decade younger. Now it’s 60 is the new 40’, and the yawning gap that women must cover up has reached about 20 years.

We, the objects

The problem lies in women being reduced to “objects” of beauty, of desire, and of attraction. This is done not just by men, nor just by women, but by societies as a whole. We almost see women in inanimate terms. This era of hyper-sexualisation leaves women of no age — little girls, young women, middle-aged women or even elderly women. It seems we took Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” quite literally, often seeing this timeless line of poetry as an implication towards women being a ‘thing’ of beauty. As women, don’t we recognise that this objectification dehumanises us somewhere? But we are as much a part of the problem as men.

Big women on the small catwalk

Why initiatives such as Chappra’s show are important is because they can go a long way in modifying, if not completely altering, perceptions about what comprises a beautiful woman. But such initiatives do not go down well with everyone. The show got mixed feedback. Some appreciated it as a game-changer, while others said these big women on the small catwalk did not belong there.

For women, it is important to take stock of themselves and ask themselves the question, “What is it that defines me?” If it is what you look like, and if that is the source of the highs and lows of your self-esteem, then clearly there is a problem. It is also important to honestly ask ourselves how we look at other women — do we value them on the basis of how they weigh, dress and look, or on the basis of who they are and what they do.

Change trickles in slowly, and it takes forever to change mindsets. But unless we, as women, start the change from within, we cannot expect society to change from without. So the next time you compliment a woman, let it be about more than “You look amazing”, and move it to “You are amazing”.

Access to smart phones and internet has played a major role in adding to the mobility of women

It takes 34-years-old Afshan Babar some 90 minutes to reach from her home in Surjani Town to the training centre run by TAF Foundation (TAFF) where she is enrolled in the Cooking and Housekeeping course at TAFF-VTI. There was a time when she could not have imagined stepping out of the house alone.

Now, the ability to reach from point A to point B has changed her life. “Watching others use public transport is what encouraged and motivated me,” says Babar. She has now joined the millions of Pakistani women, particularly in urban Pakistan, who are daring to be mobile on their own.

The credit for this acceleration in the number of women daring to go where no woman from their family had gone before goes, according to experts, to access to information technology and cellular mobile phones.

For Amber Zulfiqar, a Food and Travel Influencer & Digital PR Consultant, services like smart phone taxi services have eased up travelling for women. “Women are taking inspiration from other women — it grows like a chain. When a woman lets go of her fears of travelling alone, it is because she has heard stories of her friends using it or read encouraging material online.”

Most gender experts like Mahnaz Rahman, Director, Sindh chapter of the Aurat Foundation, agree that cellular phone access is a blessing for Pakistani women. “Technology has shown women a path that is a means to an end. Sitting at home, many women have become entrepreneurs with the help of social media,” says Rahman, adding that as ours is a patriarchal society, men have better access to information technology as more men than women have cellular phones, especially smart phones.

“Nonetheless, access to information technology has helped women get exposure to the world and step outside their cocoons, not just physically but also intellectually,” she says.

“The first step for women is to step out of their homes. Exposure helps them evolve and grow. This mobility is not just travelling from point A to point B — it is also about joining the workforce,” says Sibtain Naqvi, Head of Public Affairs at Careem.

Naqvi echoes the opinion that mobility is a serious challenge in Pakistan. “A mega city like Karachi is without a serving metro system. And the challenge is bigger for women. Even privileged women are dependent on males of the family to go out; women from the middle class who are educated are expected to sit at home simply because getting to work poses a challenge. The vans that women use to get to office and go back home do not provide personal mobility,” he adds.

A woman’s needs are beyond just getting to work or dropping and picking her children, and the urban woman has a lot on her plate owing to fast-paced lifestyles of both spouses. Taxis are prohibitively expensive, often not maintained, with rash drivers and security issues; rickshaws pose their own sets of problems.

Even privileged women are dependent on males of the family to go out; women from the middle class who are educated are expected to sit at home simply because getting to work poses a challenge.

Once urban women of Pakistan got access to cellular technology, smart phone taxi services began to fill the gap. “We are happy to share that 70 per cent of Careem’s customers who ride are females — females from all areas and all economic strata. What apps have done is that they have empowered women to make their own choices — something they do not get to exercise beyond the kitchen,” he says.

The impact of women’s access to technology is not just limited to riding with the help of such apps, but goes beyond. For Quratulain Tejani, for example, being a digital strategist and entrepreneur would not have been possible without access to a smart phone. “A few apps and tools have changed my life completely. Google Maps have made mobility so much easier and convenient. I can go from one corner of the city to another, knowing that I can find my routes easily. Even when I’m driving around and get lost, all I need is 3G and Google Maps to help me find my way,” she says, adding that Google Drive and WhatsApp have facilitated her in her professional life.

For the 200 plus female captains in Careem and for the female entrepreneurs behind the thousands of home-based small entrepreneurships that rely on social media for their marketing, cellular technology is providing opportunities of work.

These impacts are not limited to just upper tiers of society. In TAFF, one of the projects includes training and placement of women from underserved backgrounds in the Domestic Help industry.

“I’ve witnessed a dramatic transformation in students who graduate from our programme. Women who had never stepped out of their houses are now riding buses around the town to reach their workplaces on time. These are women who overcame their fears, including that of travelling on public transport to earn living incomes for their families.

“Most of them are also now part of WhatsApp groups created by TAFF-VTI to stay in touch with both students and alumni which is a testimony that technology is not only being introduced to but utilised as well by our students and graduates,” says Hammad Mateen, Programme Head at TAFF-VTI.

The mobility, then, is more than just physical. Naqvi observes that generally, technology is associated with the male gender, especially in South Asia; while girls are encouraged to join Fine Arts and Humanities, boys are encouraged to work in the field of IT. But smartphones may have broken this technological barrier for women.

“We are seeing an interplay between women and technology. Even my mother has now moved to a smart phone so that she no longer has to wait for me to take her somewhere — she can just call a smart phone taxi service. This is true both for generations of technology immigrants as well as technology natives like the youth. This change is not just of physical mobility. It is sociologic as well as demographic,” he says.

However, experts like Uzma Quresh, Social Development Specialist with the World Bank Group warn against the vulnerabilities that women are exposed to due to being active on social media and using information technology. She cites examples of cyber harassment and also mentions cases of honour killings where a girl was killed because of having access to a phone or the internet.

“Virtual mobility gives women job opportunities. E-commerce portals and IT-related skills are profitable avenues for women and also give them exposure,” she says, but adds that society has to work not just on facilitating physical mobility of women but also ensure that virtual mobility does not lead to irreversible repercussions and safety threats for women.

“It is not enough to give women access to information technology and social media; we have to work on changing mindsets,” she says. The need, then, is that the collective social thought-process moves from being restrictive to being enabling for women. That, perhaps, will be real mobility for the women of Pakistan.

I remember being asked this question many times by people I was meeting for the first time. I also remember asking other women the same insensitive question, simply because I too, like so many of us, had been conditioned to only value work that gets remuneration in return.

Looking back, the years during which I took a hiatus from work as a journalist, because I was looking after a home and my family, were the years I perhaps worked the hardest. Even physically.

Imagine for a moment that the women all around us – the mothers, the wives, the daughters and daughters-in-law, the sisters and the sisters-in-law – demanded they be paid for the care and services they provide to their families. Imagine what their bank statement would look like at the end of the year!

Let’s look at the numbers. Around the world, women spend two to 10 times more time on unpaid care work and domestic work than men – work that is not often counted in labour statistics. Countries have valued unpaid care work between 15% and 39% of national GDP. Data shows that women often have a higher total work burden than men when paid and unpaid work is combined.

On March 7, 2018, Data2X launched a new report –“Invisible No More? A Methodology and Policy Review of How Time Use Surveys Measure Unpaid Work” – with 18 case studies of countries that have started harnessing time use (TU) surveys to measure unpaid work and generate policy change regarding many issues relevant to social development. This is, in turn, making the world look at the tangible value of unpaid care and household work.

The report defines unpaid care and household work as work done by people to take care of their households and others – everyday unsung chores like cooking, cleaning, caring for children, the ill, and the elderly, and many other important tasks.

So many women among us are super women, literally. They do the jobs of cooks, cleaners, drivers, nurses, tuition teachers, psychological counsellors. They manage homes, finances and relationships. Any study of geriatrics shows that it is mostly, if not always, daughters who can be seen serving old parents and even parents-in-law.

TU surveys are important tools to understand where we, as members of the society, spend our most valuable asset – time. TU surveys, as the aforementioned report states, are quantitative summaries of how people spend their time over a specific period and how much time is spent doing each activity. These surveys help collect data that can be used to improve economic and social policies and have been used to advocate for policies that reduce the care burden, including expanding care for preschool children, elderly people, and people with disabilities. They inform and promote child protection policies by highlighting child labour and promoting broader child welfare systems. They help countries better value the contribution of unpaid care work to an economy, relative to GDP. Once we know who is spending time doing what in a society, countries can drive public campaigns to promote shared responsibilities in the home.

Today, we are celebrating International Women’s Day. And these issues can no longer be avoided. In rural areas, the load of carrying water still disproportionately falls on the women of the world because men, traditionally, do work that gets financial support for the family. But imagine if the women in rural Pakistan started charging for carrying the water back home. After all, this disparity does not only cost women time but also energy, and caloric requirements of water-fetchers increase – a requirement which is often not met for women. This is why now emphasis is being placed on highlighting the importance of men sharing the load of household chores with their women.

But what happens practically? The lion’s share of the food is given to the man because, hey, he is the one who earns. Managing a home, giving birth to children and then feeding them – it is a lot of unsung heroic work – one that needs to be appreciated. It’s high time.

As the Data2X report mentions, it is encouraging to see that slowly but surely, measuring reliably and comprehensively the unpaid household and care work traditionally performed by women has risen in prominence as a major challenge for official statistics.

Last year, in an encouraging initiative, the government of Sindh stood poised to adopt a policy for home-based workers (HBWs), making it the first province in the country to implement such a policy. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the list of home-based workers generally does not include the work women do at home.

Data2X’s new report mentions that in 2017, India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment’s Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act recognising women’s time spent in care work, went into effect. Such policies are needed in all developing countries.

The time has come that not just men, but also women, start recognising the immense contribution of women in the survival of a family and a society. Every woman works, even though she may not get paid for it. So let’s not dismiss their contribution, for they are the axis around which a society revolves.

Farahnaz is a writer and editor, and has worked as the Features Editor with The Express Tribune. Her focus is human-centric feature stories. She now writes as a freelancer, and works in the fields of communications and media training. She loves literature and traveling. She tweets as @FarahnazZahidi. Her work can be seen at chaaidaani.wordpress.com/

Today a widow is not ready to accept her traditional role in society of being dependent on others for everything in life

Every family had a few such widows — some young and others older. Their presence was not considered auspicious, and they were supposed to lead listless sedentary lives devoid of any hope for a better future, waiting for stipends and hand-me-downs, with a looming sense of guilt as if that woman was somehow responsible for the death of her husband.

More than a decade and a half since we entered the third millennium, the widowed women of Pakistan find themselves a little ahead of where they once stood on the social ladder yet are still entangled in some deep-rooted traditions, stigmas and restrictions.

More than a decade and a half since we entered the third millennium, the widowed women of Pakistan find themselves a little ahead of where they once stood on the social ladder yet are still entangled in some deep-rooted traditions, stigmas and restrictions.

Farah Kamal, an education and development consultant, describes her journey decade by decade: she grew up in the 80s, got married in the 90s, and became a widow in the new millennium. “For those girls who grew up when I did, we were not raised to lead independent lives. When I became a widow, I suddenly found myself alone. And independent. Thus, for me, the societal attitudes posed the biggest challenge, more than the financial challenge as I was already a working woman and could support myself financially.”

With the loss of her husband, Farah was encouraged by people to start living with her parents and siblings or to get a relative to live with them, a suggestion she did not accept. “We have the stereotypical image of a widow. She should be depressed, subdued, dressed in sober clothes. But today’s widow is not going to sit in a corner dressed in white, dependent on others to give her charity.”

It is not just the woman who has lost her husband that suffers the impact of social stigma that surrounds a widow. It is also her children. While Ahmer Ali was an adult when he lost his father five years ago, his experience and observing as a son what his mother has gone through has taught him a lot about the plight of a widow. “For my mother and my siblings, both finances as well as the emotional trauma were huge challenges, as were the social taboos. Take a small example that in our society a widow is supposed to dress as soberly as she can. My mother loves to wear bright colors but after my father passed away I observed she begun to avoid clothes of colour. However, I ensured that she wore what she liked,” he says.

Commenting on social attitudes, Ahmer confesses that if the prospect of his mother remarrying would have come up soon after his father passed away, he may or may not have been able to accept it. “Five years down the lane, I say to myself ‘why not?’. People need to understand that widows also have a right to lead their lives as they wish, and have a right to start afresh if they like. In Islam, there is no obstacle in a widow’s remarriage; it is in fact encouraged. The clergy needs to spread awareness about this. But instead of encouraging the widow to move on with her life, people make the one who is mourning cry more. Social attitudes towards widows need to change. It is time.”

For Nazia* (name changed on request), the experience was not entirely negative when it came to how people acted towards her after she lost her husband. “My friends and family were quite empathetic and helpful when it happened,” she says, but adds that the experience has been mixed, “Because on my husband’s first death anniversary, my relatives, and that too close ones, called and expected me to be crying and be really sad. Incidentally, my daughter got engaged two years later on the same date that my husband had died, and even my closest of kin said, ‘why did you do it on the same date?’ I got tired explaining that the boy’s sister was leaving the next day so I did not have an option,” she says. “To date, I feel people observe me intently, and expect me to be sad and depressed,” she adds.

Yet, life has not allowed her that liberty. Gaping challenges faced this mother of two when her husband passed away, leaving them in the midst of financial challenges. “I didn’t really get any time to mourn. I was out of the house on the fourth day for the death certificate. Who else was there to support me and my girls?” As her family did not own a house, Nazia had to arrange a place to live soon after becoming a widow, and started working full-time to support herself and her daughters. “I heard comments like ‘haan haan tum to buhut independent ho, tumhain kisi ki zaroorat nahin (You are a very independent woman, seems you need no one)’.” But she did what she had to in order to survive. “In so many ways, I have become a stronger woman since I lost my husband,” she says.

Another social attitude is the assumption that widowed women are on the lookout for a man to remarry. “My male colleagues stopped visiting me [even for work] because their wives did not want their husbands to interact with me,” says Farah. She poignantly describes the experience of being widowed: “It was like being off-loaded on a dark highway in the middle of a journey.” Her being a financially empowered single woman has proven to be another challenge, as men see such a woman as a lucrative prospect.

Advising young girls, Farah says girls need to be independent and educated to be able to support themselves if such a situation in life arises. She is also of the opinion that girls should weigh carefully factors like health and lifestyle of a man before marrying, because unhealthy lifestyles or diseases of a man may result in his prematurely leaving this world, and the widow being left to suffer.

“I hate when in the ‘marital status’ column, I am asked to write ‘widow’,” Farah says. “This status does not identify who I am. I have also realised that my happiness is my own responsibility, as is my survival. This trial has made me stronger as a woman.”

The reasons for women lagging behind men in the race to get registered as citizens are many, and in rural areas the factors multiply

Till the age of 31, Kaneez Bibi from Karor Pakka, district Lodhran, never felt the need to be registered as a citizen of Pakistan. She had no birth certificate and no B Form. By the time she was 31, she was already married and a mother of two girls who also, in turn, had not been registered at birth.

“Traditionally, in our village, people didn’t feel it was necessary for a woman to have a national identity card (NIC),” she says. Men are the ones who traditionally own property, get preference in education, and have ambitions to be financially independent, not women. But some ten years ago, Kaneez found an incentive to rush to get her NIC made — the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) that gave her the hope of a monthly stipend.

Today, at the age of 41, Kaneez is thankful she got the NIC, as none of the employers in Karachi want to hire her as house help till she shows them her NIC. “Once we moved to Karachi, I realised that to get my daughters admitted in school I needed to get their B Forms made.”

The reasons for women lagging behind men in the race to get registered as citizens are many, and in rural areas the factors multiply.

If women do not have an identity card, they lose out on everything, says Maliha Zia Lari, lawyer and gender activist. “Without it they are not recognised by law; they officially do not exist. It has a massive impact on the personal, the social and the institutional levels.”

Without the NIC, women cannot reach out for any legal protection, their ability do anything on their own is curtailed; they cannot hope for independence. They cannot own or inherit property, and also cannot hope for insurance or be the beneficiary of any welfare initiative, as Lari explains. “Nadra requires a family certificate now for everything, so even the husband not having an ID card poses a problem if and when the wife and children want to get registered. Child marriage cannot be mitigated if a girl without an ID card is married off as she may be a minor for all we know.”

The reasons for women lagging behind men in the race to get registered as citizens are many, and in rural areas the factors multiply. “One of the issues is fulfilling the legal requirements and documentation required for getting the CNIC. Women in rural areas often don’t have means to readily get to the towns, are illiterate, have restrictions on mobility due to traditional customs and cannot travel alone [due to security reasons or family restrictions], and male members of their families don’t always support them to get to offices of the National Database & Registration Authority (Nadra),” says Ali Akbar from the Association for Water, Applied Education & Renewable Energy (AWARE) in district Tharparkar.

Akbar shares instances where women who did not have NICs were exploited and robbed of their rights. “Brothers and fathers who were not willing to give the rightful share of wealth to a sister or a daughter would, to close the revenue department’s record, get the tehsildar to record the statement of a couple of villagers mentioning that Mr so and so has no sister/daughters or that she has died or she is not claiming her right, and thus this male member of the family has the right to hold this property. But now the Nadra record is computerised and the woman has to be present and her statement recorded before the magistrate or registrar for any change in the legal ownership of property. The NIC, then, is a basic pillar for the empowerment of any woman.”

However, the awareness about the importance of being a registered citizen is growing among Pakistani women. Mahnaz Rahman, Director, Sindh chapter of the Aurat Foundation, says the projects by AF aim to incentivise it in many ways for women. “For example, we tell Muslim women that you need it to go for Hajj otherwise you cannot get a passport to travel for the pilgrimage. There is increased realisation about this among the lower income and middle income strata as well where the women are working to support their families,” she says.

Currently, AF is working on a project aimed at women from non-Muslim communities, encouraging them to get CNICs and in turn to exercise their right to cast the vote.

The BISP has had a positive impact in encouraging women like Kaneez to apply for NICs. “Our surveys show that numbers of women who have registered for the NIC has increased exponentially,” says Hasrat Prakash, Field Supervisor, BISP, in Mithi and Chachro, district Tharparkar, who adds that women are not just going for the ID card but are actually opting for the Smart National Identity Card (SNIC), Pakistan’s first national electronic identity card. The SNIC contains a data chip and many security features.

“BISP now requires biometric verification, which incentivised making of these SNICs. The incentive, of course, is the money stipend. The best part is that more women are now included in the voters’ list, and that more people are registering daughters at birth for the B Form, especially the eldest daughter of each family,” says Prakash.

As mobility still remains a real issue for women, facilitation efforts are being made by various organisations to help them get registered. “If in any locality we find one hundred or more women who need to get registered, Nadra’s mobile van comes there to help us and register women on the spot. There are holistic efforts by the civil society, aid agencies, Nadra and BISP among others, and the situation is comparatively better,” says Rahman, but also adds that more campaigns and efforts are needed for social mobilisation.

“Registering can be a tiresome process and if the people are not highly motivated why would they give up on a week’s daily wages to get an identity card?” says Lari, adding that “the most important thing that needs to be done is make the registration free as well as easier.”

An initiative that spreads pro-girls’ education slogans via truck art is hoping to change mindsets in Kohistan and around the country

Fantastical figures that are half-human, half-animal, scenes of vibrantly coloured roses and pine trees, and famous truck poetry with witty couplets that mostly don’t rhyme. Pakistan’s truck art is a part of our cultural heritage, appropriated by designers in various forms. But now, in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s Kohistan district, truck art is serving more than the purpose of being just visually pleasing. Trucks here are becoming vehicles for spreading awareness regarding educating girls, and truck art is making its way to bridges and classrooms with messages like Baba, mujhay sona aur chaandi nahin, kitaab aur qalam la kar do (Father, don’t bring me silver or gold, but bring me a book and a pen), Ilm taaqat hai, Ilm roshni hai (knowledge is power, knowledge is light) and Kitaabain ghar ka chiraagh hain (Books are the lamps that light up a house).

“It’s an initiative that I am so proud of because the local community has owned it,” says documentary filmmaker and rights activist Samar Minallah who developed the concept of a culturally relevant advocacy initiative through truck art. “The brightly painted trucks are like moving billboards that amplify a message from one part of Pakistan to another. My visit to Kohistan further reinforced my belief in using art and traditional motifs and designs for raising awareness,” says Minallah. Kohistan, according to the Alif Ailaan Pakistan Education District ranking 2015, is the worst performing district educationally in KP.

According to local teachers, children of primary schools of Pattan look forward to attending their newly painted classrooms decorated with bright indigenous symbols from Kohistan.

Using indigenous sensitivities and art in mind, Minallah interviewed local people for their opinion and collected local embroidery motifs created by village women as the preparatory research for the project, to incorporate in the final drawings and paintings. “The aim was to not only raise awareness about the importance of education for girls but also to honour local art and crafts, and develop a sense of ownership for the local community members,” she says. The total number of trucks that have been painted till now with these messages is 30.

“The feedback has been great because indigenous art and tools were used to convince local communities about the importance of education for girls, so it found acceptance and appreciation,” said Dr Ziaur Rehman Faruqi who is Head of Programmes at National Integrated Development Association (NIDA), and is actively involved with the project ‘Girls Right to Education’ in collaboration with UNESCO and both the federal and provincial governments. In the spirit of collaborative efforts, Faruqi shared that they have brought on board not just local leaders and parents but also the religious clergy and the political leadership for what he called a “holistic approach”. “This could not have been achieved otherwise as Kohistan had multiple issues like ghost schools and teachers.”

School children of Kohistan took part in interactive painting activities .

According to local teachers, children of primary schools of Pattan look forward to attending their newly painted classrooms decorated with bright indigenous symbols from Kohistan, shares Minallah, adding that truck owners from Punjab have reached out to the artists to have their trucks painted with similar images and messages. “One of the local mosque imams asked if his mosque’s name could also be added on the newly painted bridge along with the pro-education empowering messages,” she says. Local people take selfies and photos from their mobile phones in front of these bridges of Sholgara, Dubair and Bisham adorned with important messages such as

Bhai aur behen mil kar school jaain, Zindagi main ilm se roshni jalaain (Both brother and sister should go to school and bring to life the light of knowledge) and Apni aulaad ko taleem ka tohfa daen (Give your children the gift of education).

Atif Khan, Minister for Education, KP, shares how education of girls is now being seen as a priority. “We are especially working on education for girls. Examples are that 70 per cent of all new schools we are working on are schools for girls, and also 70 per cent of the work to provide missing facilities in schools is focused on facilities for girls,” he says. As an incentive, female education managers in backward districts like Kohistan are being paid 50 per cent extra. Lauding the initiative to sensitize communities towards the right of education for girls through truck art, the minister said that traditions don’t change overnight. “Just constructing schools and passing bills is not enough. It is the mindsets that have to be worked on.”

“Work on this project has made me happy. It made the girls and their teachers happy. The classrooms looked beautiful. The girls would join in painting with me,” said Shaukat Khan, the painter who has till now painted these positive messages with colourful drawings on three bridges and eight classrooms in far-flung parts of Kohistan. “Initially the locals resisted. They were even upset. But once they saw the finished work, they began to like the idea. Change is starting to happen,” said Khan. Khan, a father of four daughters and one son, is an artist from Swat, who has made sure his daughters are going to school “because girls must get an education”.